[Mars Surface, September 2010]

The air hit him first.

Ethan drew a slow breath through his nose and held it for a moment, standing on the surface of a world that two hours ago had been a cold, rust-coloured desert with an atmosphere too thin to sustain a conversation, let alone a civilisation.

What filled his lungs now was clean in a way that New York had never managed. Crisp, cool and carrying the faint mineral sharpness of freshly turned earth, the kind of air that felt like it had never been asked to carry anything unpleasant.

"Wow," he said, and the word came out entirely without irony. He took another breath just to confirm. "This is actually better than Earth."

’Of course it is. Mars hasn’t had seven billion people spending a century treating the atmosphere like a public waste bin.’

He exhaled and looked out across the surface, taking stock of what the World Engines had delivered.

The sky above was a deep, rich blue, not the pale washed-out blue of Earth’s upper atmosphere, but something richer, the blue of deep ocean water viewed from beneath the surface. Clouds moved in the upper reaches, white and unhurried.

The temperature at the surface was comfortable, it might make a person want to take their jacket off, which was an extraordinary statement about a planet that four hours ago had averaged minus sixty degrees Celsius.

The terraforming was complete, foundation was solid and the atmosphere held.

’Now for the part where I bleed on an entire planet.’

He rolled up his sleeve and raised one hand, calling Genesis power to his palm until the energy gathered into a concentrated edge, bright and clean.

He drew it across his forearm in a single, deliberate motion. The cut opened instantly, blood welling up in a vivid red line across his skin, and then the regeneration followed it like a wave chasing the shore, sealing the wound even as he used his telekinesis to lift the blood free before it closed.

The volume he needed was not modest.

He focused, pulling the blood upward and outward in a slowly expanding sphere, his telekinetic grip handling the fluid.

His regeneration keeping pace without effort, restoring what he took faster than he could take it, so there was no dizziness and drain, not even the mild inconvenience of feeling lightheaded. His body treated the entire exercise as a minor administrative task and processed it accordingly.

He pulled 1.45 quadrillion litres.

The sphere of blood floating above him had grown large enough to blot out a significant portion of the sky overhead, a dark, glistening mass held in perfect suspension by his telekinesis, catching the Martian sunlight and throwing it back in deep crimson and warm gold.

It was, objectively, one of the stranger things he had ever done with his power, and his list of strange things was not short.

Then he shifted his weather manipulation and reached into the atmosphere, restructuring the moisture cycle.

He converted the suspended blood into rain, not literally blood rain, the matter manipulation accompanying the weather working took the organic compounds and distributed them into the soil as rich, life-sustaining nutrients, the same way his blood fertilised Earth’s soil, only scaled to a planet.

The rain fell across the entire surface of Mars simultaneously.

He watched it come down, steady, the droplets catching the blue-tinged light and falling into the red-brown earth below where it was no longer red-brown but darkening with moisture, turning the colour of good, rich farmland.

The fertility in his blood was already working, breaking down into the soil chemistry in real time, seeding the ground with the biological potential that had made Earth’s farmlands more productive by orders of magnitude.

’Good. Let’s move to the next part.’

He turned his attention to the geography, because a terraformed planet with nothing but flat plains was liveable but not interesting, and Ethan had never been in the business of building things that were merely functional when they could be beautiful.

He raised both hands and let his matter manipulation expand outward across the planet’s crust, reading the geological structure beneath him, the old fault lines and pressure points, the buried ridgelines and ancient impact formations, and then he began to work with them rather than against them.

Mountains rose along the natural stress fractures in the crust, built upward from existing geological formations rather than created from nothing, which meant they would stand for geological timescales rather than decades.

He added ridgelines and valleys, carved river channels that followed the natural gradient of the terrain, and shaped the coastlines of the oceans that were about to arrive.

Because Mars had water.

Enormous reserves of it sat locked in the subsurface rock and the permafrost deposits that the thermal injectors had already begun to warm.

He reached down with his telekinesis and began to draw it upward, pulling the underground reserves to the surface with the slow, deliberate care, because he understood that releasing that much water too quickly would create more problems than it solved.

He guided it into the channels he had prepared, filling the river valleys first, then the lower basins that would become lakes, and finally opening the deep geological reservoirs that fed the oceanic trenches.

The water spread across the surface in silver sheets that caught the sunlight and threw it back in long, bright flashes. Oceans formed. Rivers carved their channels and ran clean and cold toward the coasts.

Islands pushed up through the shallower offshore waters, some large enough to qualify as continents in miniature, others small enough to be the kind of private paradise that people spent their entire lives saving money to visit for a week.

He had not forgotten the ice formations he had found during his initial survey, the ancient glacial mountains locked into the polar and sub-polar regions that the World Engines had preserved during the atmospheric warming process.

He moved to them next, not to melt them, but to shape them. He worked with care, using matter manipulation to sculpt the existing ice into something that deserved to be seen, raising peaks that made Everest look like a respectably sized hill, carving deep blue-white faces into the mountainsides that would catch the Martian sunlight and hold it like stained glass.

Those were face carvings of him and his women etched into the mountains. He smiled as he imagined their reactions when they finally saw them.

He cut plateaus into the mid-sections where he could already picture a terrace, a fire, the people he loved sitting with their feet dangling over a drop that fell for three kilometres before it reached the glacier below.

’Jean would love this. She would look out over that view and say something beautiful and it would make me feel like an architect of the gods. Anna would immediately want to climb down the outside face without using her powers, just to prove she could. Susan would spend twenty minutes assessing the structural integrity before she admitted it was spectacular. Diana would stand at the edge and look like she belonged there. Didi would...’

He paused. ’Didi would probably just appear already at the bottom, smiling, and ask why I looked so impressed with myself.’

The smile that crossed his face was private and warm.

He scattered seeds next, pulling them from the inventory in vast quantities, everything he had collected and catalogued across years of preparation, trees from every continent on Earth, plant species from dozens of biomes, grasses and ferns and flowering things that had no business growing on a planet that four hours ago had possessed no soil worth the name.

He distributed them across the surface using telekinesis, placing them in the zones he had shaped for them, matching root systems to soil types and sun exposure.

Then he reached for Chronokinesis.

’I said I was going to take things slow. I meant the big things. Trees take years. I’m not standing on Mars for years watching grass grow when I have a Genesis Chamber to build and people at home who will absolutely find a way to cause an incident without me there.’

He localised the temporal acceleration carefully, applying it only to the biological growth across the planet’s surface rather than to himself or to the planet’s broader environmental systems, no need to accelerate plate tectonics along with the flora.

The effect rippled outward across Mars in a green shimmer that was visible from orbit.

Minutes passed and the surface changed.

Green spread across the plains and the hillsides and the mountain valleys in slow, rolling waves, the kind of green that makes a person understand viscerally why every civilisation in human history had used it as a symbol of life.

Forests rose along the river valleys and climbed the lower mountain slopes. Grasslands spread across the wide southern plains. The islands in the ocean filled with dense, layered canopy.

He stood in the middle of it and breathed.

The air was even better now. Richer, carrying the green smell of growing things alongside the mineral freshness of the soil and the cool salt edge of the ocean winds.

His gaze moved upward, out past the atmosphere to the clear Martian sky, and a practical thought arrived.

The Earth’s orbit was already becoming a logistical problem. Decades of satellite launches had layered the space around the planet in a slowly accumulating belt of defunct hardware, dead spacecraft, and fragmented debris that was going to cause genuine crises for space travel within a generation.

Mars had none of that yet, and he intended to keep it that way.

He reached outward and gathered the derelict satellites and orbital debris from Earth’s surrounding space into his inventory with a sweep of telekinesis, pulling them out of their decaying orbits and setting them aside. 𝒻𝘳ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝒷𝘯ℴ𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝑐ℴ𝑚

He would convert them through matter manipulation later, break them down to their component elements and rebuild them into something useful.

There was not enough to matter yet, but at the rate humanity was launching hardware into low orbit, there would be within decades.

’I’m Cleaning up now before the problem becomes expensive.’

He filed the thought away and descended to the surface again, walking across the grass with his hands in his pockets and his eyes moving across the landscape with the quiet satisfaction.

He chose a location at the edge of a cliff that looked out over the primary ocean, the water stretching blue-green to the horizon with the new islands visible as dark shapes in the middle distance.

The elevation and the view were right. The ground beneath was solid volcanic rock layered under centuries of compressed mineral deposits, which made it an ideal foundation for what he intended to build here.

He extended both hands and his eyes shifted to deep, luminous blue as the matter manipulation engaged at full scale.

The palace took shape over the following hours.

He had spent considerable time designing it in his mind before he had ever left New York, going back to it during quiet moments, refining the details.

The finished thing that rose from the Martian cliff top drew its bones from the architecture of Asgard, because Odin’s palace was one of the few structures Ethan had encountered in this universe that felt genuinely built for beings of scale, for people who carried weight and needed their surroundings to carry it with them.

But Asgard’s aesthetic was all gold and vertical grandeur, beautiful in the way, impressive but slightly exhausting to live inside.

He had kept the scale and shed the formality.

The exterior walls were built from a composite he created through matter manipulation, dense and deep-toned, somewhere between the dark basalt of volcanic rock and the warm amber of old stone.

The towers were tall but not aggressive, rising in clean lines that stepped outward slightly as they climbed rather than narrowing to points, which gave the silhouette breadth rather than just height.

The main gates were wide enough to admit beings considerably larger than human scale, framed in Asgardian-influenced ironwork that he had adapted with runes woven into the metalwork itself, so that the protection array extended into the structure of the building rather than sitting on top of it.

Inside, the great hall was built around a central space open all the way to the roof, with the upper levels looking down over the main floor from wide, railed galleries.

The floors were pale stone, almost white, and the light came from panels set into the ceiling that he had calibrated to approximate the full spectrum of natural sunlight.

The private wings extended back from the main hall in separate structures connected by covered walkways, each one designed with different people in mind. He knew the preferences of the people who would live here well enough to build their spaces before they had ever asked for them.

Jean’s study faced east, toward the rising sun. Anna’s rooms had ceilings high enough that she could come and go without thinking about angles. Diana’s quarters faced the ocean, because he knew she would want to stand at the window and look at the water.

Susan’s workspace had the best light in the building and the most structurally interesting ceiling, because Susan Storm wanted to have a starry ceiling.

Didi’s space he left intentionally undefined, with walls that could be anything and floors that shifted between materials at a thought.

He stood in the great hall when it was finished and looked up at the ceiling far above him and said nothing for a moment.

Then he thought, ’Not bad, Ethan. You should be proud.’

He moved through the completed building toward the section he had designated for the Genesis Chamber, a large, deep underground structure accessed through a descent into the rock beneath the palace’s foundations.

He placed it there deliberately, not because it needed to be hidden but because what it did deserved a certain gravity, and gravity was easier to maintain underground, away from the light and the view and the easy pleasures of the world above.

He settled the Genesis Chamber into place and layered spells over it, a combination of Mystic Arts wards and Asgardian runes that would make it effectively undetectable to any scan or magical survey that did not already know it was there.

Then he pulled a small skull form his inventory, it’s the Codex.

The Codex sat in his hand, its surface warm, and he spent a few minutes going through the notes he had prepared, the genetic specifications for the first Kryptonian child, the baseline physiological parameters, the sun-adaptation pathways, the characteristic traits he had selected from the full genetic record with care.

He had thought about the loyalty question on the way to Mars and he had thought about it again during the terraforming and he had reached the same answer both times.

He would build loyalty to his family into their foundational psychology, not as a compulsion but as a deep, dispositional value, the same way a person raised with genuine love and good values would find themselves naturally inclined toward protecting the people who raised them.

It was not freedom removal. It was foundation building. He had drawn the line clearly in his mind and he intended to hold it.

He straightened, looked at the Chamber, and allowed the smile to return.

"Alright," he said quietly, his voice carrying in the deep stillness of the underground chamber. "Let’s also figure out a name for the first son of Mars who is also the first Kryptonian born in this multiverse."

He tapped his fingers once against the Codex. "That deserves something worth carrying."

He began to think.